I had originally worded the title for this post as “Eastside Hockey Manager series cancelled,” but that’s not completely true. According to this post over at Sigames.com the series has been put on hold due to lack of sales, which they believe has been caused by piracy.

The series did receive a great deal of critical acclaim but apparently that wasn’t enough to make it a success in the marketplace.

I always wanted to take a look at the newer versions of this game, but I’ve just not been able to get myself excited about text sims in the past few years.

Hopefully they’ll be able to get things straightened out and put the game back on the market again in the future.

3 Responses to Eastside Hockey Manager series put on hold

Their soccer management game has been pirated far more than hockey, and it seems to be doing ok. Let’s not blame the fact that you’re making a hockey game. Let’s not blame the fact that you’re making a hockey SIM game. Let’s not blame the fact that you’re making a hockey sim game that’s called Eastside and not NHL or something recognizeable. Let’s blame piracy. Such a cop out..It makes me a little upset to know these are the kinds of folks I’ve bought every edition of soccer/football manager from.

I was doing beta testing for EHM 2007 and all I can say is how incredibly disappointing this is. It’s an exceptional game that’s improved dramatically every year of it’s release.Thankfully the game is flexible and strong enough in it’s current iteration then I know I’ll still happily be able to play this several years down the road without feeling I’m missing a lot.I don’t know what the sales figures were like, so it’s hard to comment definitively. The game was pirated VERY rampantly though, that much I’m certain. Especially with the EHM 2005 version there were tons of people posting on the forums asking for assistance with pirated copies.Marketing may also have been a reason for it’s failure… besides a tiny amount of online marketing and then only in the last year or so I very seldom heard or saw anything at all about EHM. I suppose it’s difficult to justify spending a considerable amount marketing the game when it’s target market is largely unknown and past sales figures aren’t particularly spectacular.I get the impression that the game is effectively cancelled altogether, though SI didn’t specifically say that. At the very least I don’t think it at all likely there will be any new EHM in the next several years.Perhaps one day it’ll be resurrected… I sincerely hope so. It was legitimately a fantastic game, with stellar support from the developers.There are no competing hockey management sims to look to for an alternative either.